The Cloud Pod 'rebrands' Itself As Pod

Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) joins us once again on this early April episode of The Cloud Pod.

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A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

🚨 Zoom responds to a new surge of criticism.
🚨 AWS offers a new cheap storage solution.
🚨 Google offers researchers open access to COVID-19 analysis tools.

General News: Spotting Savings

🤖 Spotinst, an Isreali-based startup which uses AI-powered software to optimize cloud computing expenduratues, has rebranded to Spot. We expect AI-powered is a bit of a stretch, but it should make it easier to adopt the service. Good luck Googling them now though.

COVID-19: Volatile Markets

📈 After a huge spike in customers, Slack now sees over one billion usage minutes per day. Investors, take caution: nobody knows how much usage will stick around after the pandemic.

🚫 Microsoft implemented temporary usage restrictions to prioritize availability for health-related workloads. Customers in the free tier can expect to see the most impact.

🔬 Video conferencing platform Zoom is under the legal microscope for privacy concerns and weak security. Be certain to use passwords or risk opening yourself up to internet pranksters.

📨 Zoom CEO Eric Yuan published an open letter to users detailing their established and planned responses to the issues brought by all the unexpected traffic. Twenty times more traffic has been a difficult spike to adjust to, and Zoom will offer additional training for those new to the service.

AWS: Looking Closely

💽 Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now offers a low-cost hard disk drive option, aimed toward workloads that don’t require the high performance of the existing solid state drive option. We’d love to see this level of affordability available for Linux as well.

🔎 The AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer tool has been brought to AWS Organizations. While it was already pretty cool, this should make the Access Analyzer much more useful.

🌎 AWS has opened a third availability zone in the Canada (Central) Region. Another availability zone is always good.

🕵️‍♀️ Amazon Detective, a managed service which uses machine learning to determine the causes and impacts of security issues, is now generally available. If something this nice is being announced now, we can’t wait to see what was planned for re:Inforce.

Google: Googling Your Symptoms

📖 Google has created the COVID-19 Public Dataset Program which allows researchers to access and analyze publicly available health datasets. It’s good to see a proactive and generous response from the private sector.

🗂️ Service Directory is a new tool for Google Cloud customers to manage their services across environments.

Azure: Living on the Edge

💸 Microsoft acquired the 5G specialist company Affirmed Networks in order to better cater to telecom providers.

📱 Azure is introducing Azure Edge Zones, a partnership between Azure and several other companies to bring a selection of Virtual Network Functions to certain carriers and cities. One use case highlighted is in autonomous vehicles. Having seen spotty cell coverage, we’d hate to think what spotty car coverage might look like.

🏛️ An earlier report that Microsoft saw a 775 percent increase in usage has been corrected to specify that that number applied only to the Microsoft Teams service, for a one-month period in Italy. Other areas have seen growth closer to 30 percent.

🦾 The workflow automation feature of Azure Security Center is now generally available. Security is fun!

Lightning Round

⚡ Jonathan takes the point this week in his very first quip, tying the score at three points each for Justin and Jonathan.

Other headlines mentioned:

The Cloud Pod ‘rebrands’ itself as Pod – EP66